Question

How do you check how many letters are in a Java string?

How do you check what letter is in a certain position in the string (i.e, the second letter of the string)?

Answer 1

A)

String str = "a string";
int length = str.length( ); // length == 8

http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#length%28%29

edit

If you want to count the number of a specific type of characters in a String, then a simple method is to iterate through the String checking each index against your test case.

int charCount = 0;
char temp;

for( int i = 0; i < str.length( ); i++ )
{
    temp = str.charAt( i );

    if( temp.TestCase )
        charCount++;
}

where TestCase can be isLetter( ), isDigit( ), etc.

Or if you just want to count everything but spaces, then do a check in the if like temp != ' '

B)

String str = "a string";
char atPos0 = str.charAt( 0 ); // atPos0 == 'a'

http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#charAt%28int%29